actually i beat my target. that dell xps quadcore q6600, junkyjunky always rated a 5.4. i was just trying to match that. the geforce 9800 pushed me past it, but the prossessor took me back to 5.6. numbers get me randy, lol

Scott, just a question for you. Did you have to switch to AHCI from SATA in your motherboard settings to install Win7? That might drop your score, but thats about all i can think that would do that....unless the SATA driver they have included with 7 isn't as good as the manufacturer's driver

I loaded Win7 on netbook which has WinXP on it; the drivers had to be updated for Win7 so I think WEI scoring may be affected by the drivers we use. You might want to load the Win7-capable drivers on your Vista system so you compare same drivers for Vista and Win7. I got comparable-but-better scores in Win7 vs others who have Vista running on the netbook.